December 2005
Page12
1905: the first
Russian Revolution
One hundred years ago this year there happened a series
of events in Russia, culminating in a general uprising in
December, that Trotsky called 'the dress rehearsal for the
revolution of 1917' and which in terms of bloodshed were
far more violent than the actual events in St. Petersburg
twelve years later.

   Russia at the time was a predominantly agrarian country. 80 per cent of its inhabitants were peasants, eking out a very meagre existence from the soil. They had been emancipated from being serfs in 1861 by a decree of Tsar Alexander III but peasant understanding of personal ownership in land remained very rudimentary. After the 1861 emancipation act there arose a widespread and deeply held belief among the peasants that at some time in the future a redistribution of land was going to happen. This belief made them a very volatile and potentially revolutionary class, although they had no political aims and could see no further than land.

  Whereas in Britain and most of Europe at the time, a strong nobility had limited the power of the monarch, allowing a rising capitalist class to develop. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas had absolute power. He ruled under a system called patrimonialism, in which everything belonged to the Tsar. He was absolute monarch and nothing could change without his consent. There was no parliament or constitution. Government officials were directly responsible to him, and he believed firmly in upholding this system, much as Charles I of England believed firmly in the divine right of Kings. This meant in practice that the growth of
capitalist industry in Russia was limited and largely reliant on foreign capital.
Consequently the indigenous capitalist class was very weak.

As a result of this weakness the path to a political and legal set-up in which capitalist development could flourish was
undertaken by the 'intelligentsia', a concept peculiar to Russia. Comprised largely of university students, lawyers, and artists
(i.e. writers) it was more or less open to anyone who was against the patrimonial set-up. And because Tsar Nicholas was
extremely rigid in his outlook and frightened of any change that could limit his power, democratic protest from the 1870s onwards was not an option. Protest became channelled into the form of violence, with assassinations of government officials taking a prominent part.  A movement, openly committed to assassination, called the People's Will came into being, attracting the support of much of the intelligentsia, including, for a time, Lenin. Some thousands of government officials were killed; assassination became a way of life.

 The response from the government, backed by the Tsar, was repression, to clamp down ever more tightly. The use of
whips by the police to quell student strikes did not endear the government to those who wanted change. At the close of the
19th century with the setting-up of the Okhrana, Russia became the first police state in history. It was riddled with secret
police infiltrating agents into most of the anti-Tsar organisations. Various political parties had developed by this time, with
varying aims, ranging from the establishment of a parliament and a constitution to establishing socialism.

 The exact nature of what they meant by socialism was never really stated, but probably boiled down to some kind of
nationalisation, with tight government control. Around this time many of Marx's early writings had arrived in Russia and
Marx was very popular, but not much understood. Funnily enough Capital was allowed by the censor who thought it was
so dreary no one would read it, but mostly Marx's writings were smuggled in.

  By 1905 there were three major political parties loosely representing different class interests. They were the Democratic Constitutional Party (Kadets) (bourgeois), Social Democratic Labour Party (working class or proletariat in the language of the day), and Socialist Revolutionaries (roughly, peasants and workers).

  Tactics varied from assassination,advocating strike action, to 'leading the workers to the dictatorship of the proletariat' but all were agreed on the necessity to remove the Tsar. From the 1890s onwards things were growing tense.
Conditions of work in the factories and railways were abysmal, with very low wages, working hours of twelve to fourteen hours a day and appalling living conditions, much like they had been a few years earlier in Britain's industrial revolution.

 There were many very large factories in Russia employing up to six thousand workers, attracting thousands of unskilled peasants. They were mainly housed in rapidly built barracks crammed in four or five to one room, quite a few of those employing a night shift saving on bed linen by having the night and day shifts use the same bed.
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